Mad Men Confronts Heaven and Hull: The Season 3 Finale

After what one overwrought reviewer called “the bleakest hour of prime-time television drama I have ever seen” (“So a dark shadow descended over dark lives, and the result last Sunday was one of those shows where, when it ends, you just sit in your chair for a couple of minutes”—I sometimes feel that way watching Jay Leno), Mad Men faced a double hurdle last night in its chug to the finish line. It had to reckon with the mournful residue of J.F.K.’s assassination—the melancholy pall over the holiday season (living-room Christmas trees have seldom looked less festive)—and execute a season finale that would satisfy built-up expectations and generate new, enticing ones. At first Mad Men seemed as if it was going to dig deeper into the coal pit of despond. The first thing we hear is Don coughing in bed in the morning, a smoker’s cough that reminded me that it was in November of 1963 that The New Yorker ran a long report by Thomas Whiteside on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. And throughout the episode, infernal smoke seemed to emanate from Don even when the camera didn’t show him taking a puff (at one point a cloud billowed from the side of the frame toward Jared Harris’s Price from Don’s direction, like a Western front moving through). But although the domestic scenes between Don and Betty were as funereal as one would expect to illustrate the dissolution of a marriage in benumbed shades of brown and black (Don’s calling Betty a “whore” struck me as an uncharacteristic false note), the surprise kick of the Mad Men season ender was how inspirited and interlocking it was as everyone swung into action rather than be passively swallowed into the maw of the advertising mothership McCann Erickson. Assuming command of their own fates knocked the alienation out of them, and Joan’s serene-goddess return was the cherry on the sundae.“To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, a statement that this episode seemed to take as its guiding principle and secular gospel. Nautical allusions abounded. “Cooper will be put on an ice floe,” Connie Hilton told Don, divulging the news of the ad-agency mega-consolidation in the works. Resisting at first the argument of Bert Cooper and Don that they band together to buy Sterling Cooper and remain independent, Roger says he’s content to stay put. His role in the new corporate regime is of no great consequence. “If I’m useless, so be it. There’s a deck chair somewhere with my name on it.” After Roger is persuaded to join the mutiny, the next vital recruit in the chain of command is the Truman Capote-ish Pryce who, despite being treated as a pawn and patsy by his fellow-Brit overlords, remains initially noncompliant. Why should I help you? he asks Don, who replies: “Because once this sale goes through, you’ll be thrown overthrown and you’ll be a corpse knocking against their hull.” A vivid image, you must concede.* (Marriage is a separate voyage. “All along you’ve been building a life raft,” Don accuses Betty after learning about Henry, the new man in her life with the silver, fatherly, Republican hair.)

Instead of existential droppings into the void, the episode was characterized by sharp, tart exchanges of pride clashing against pride. When Bert tells Don that young men like him think it’s so easy building something, Don seethes, “And you old men love golden tombs and sealing the rest of us in with you.” In his first (failed) wooing run at Peggy, Don, his male ego getting the worst of him, says gruffly after being rebuffed, “Peggy, I’m not going to beg you,” to which Peggy shoots back: “‘Beg’ me? You didn’t even ask me.” And the scene in which Don and Roger pay a call on Pete, who called in sick to the office because he had a job interview set up, is a comic jewel beginning with his calling out to Trudy “Where the hell are my pajamas?” and then shluffing around in his bathrobe with a fake cold and his hair flopping over his forehead, looking as if he’s fourteen (Wally in Leave It to Beaver). As with Peggy, Don has to ditch his aura of eternal cocktail hour all-knowingness and admit he’d misjudged Pete’s capabilities, that he saw things coming the rest of us didn’t. Like what? “Aeronautics, teenagers, the Negro market.” Fine, says Pete, but if I sign on I want my name in the lobby. There isn’t going to be a lobby, he’s told. Oh, well, whatever. Then Pete stands, extends his hand to shake on the deal and his hand hangs in space for a beat or two until he confesses he’s not really sick. After Don and Roger leave, Pete and Trudy kiss, and is there a cuter couple on TV than Pete and Trudy? I think not.

Although this episode began with ominous echoes of The Godfather (“I get it now, Connie—it’s business,” says Don early on, looking at times like Michael Corleone in Godfather II with the vultures roosting in his soul after Fredo’s fate has been decided), it pedaled into an inspirational tale--an entrepreneurial vision of A Christmas Carol, where everyone comes together under one roof not out of love or family ties or sentimental obligation but out of mutual economic self-interest and buccaneer solidarity, sink or swim, eat or be eaten. “Well, it’s official,” toasts Roger after he, Don, Bert, and Pryce form their rebel alliance. “Friday, December 13, 1963: Four guys shot their own legs off.” The shark cunning entailed in starting up this new agency may seem cold, bloodless, and mercenary—an Ayn Rand mission minus the rhetorical bombast--but the collaborative enthusiasm of this breakout operation was brisk, invigorating: it gave you a lift being in an adult universe where talent and initiative were on the move and mediocrity left behind to fend for itself. When Don emerged from the bedroom of his suite at the Pierre and saw the Sterling Cooper defectors cheerfully setting up shop and helping themselves to the lunch Trudy brought (“Every type of sandwich imaginable,” she chirps, “and a cake”—Trudy is the greatest!), the scene had the bustle and cheer of gifts being opened on Christmas morn. So heartwarming is the tableau that Don manages to lemon-squeeze a half-smile, which for a man on the brink of divorce may be the most he can manage.

Well-done, Mad Men. Welcome back, Joan. And make way for 1964, when a certain quartet lands at J.F.K. Airport on route to The Ed Sullivan Show and the real Sixties begin. Duck may want to pick up some love beads to go with his turtleneck and Trudy in go-go boots--the prospect is just too groovily divine.

*And let us not forget that the official promotional photograph for Mad Men that showed Jon Hamm's Don D. up to his hips in symbolic floodwaters. Man, these guys are thinking ahead.